San Luis Obispo County’s Healthy Agency is bringing crisis and stabilization services under one sustainable umbrella.
“The current system is that access and crisis is spread out among all of the divisions,” Behavioral Health Director Star Graber said at the SLO County Board of Supervisors meeting on Oct. 22. “If it’s the youth division, it would be a different division manager. If the patient is an adult client, it would be a different manager. What this does is bring all of that together in centralized division but still allows different populations to be served, and also allows the divisions to really focus on their specific knowledge in that arena.”
Germinated several years ago under a strategic plan, the new access and crisis services division under the agency’s behavioral health department would provide managed care, crisis coordination, and oversight of round-the-clock programs and services. Licensed Clinical Social Worker Samantha Parker was appointed as the overarching division manager.
With unanimous approval from supervisors, SLO County now joins the counties of Alameda, Santa Cruz, and San Joaquin that have similar access and crisis services divisions that cross over different departments.
SLO County’s division will offer crisis and urgent services for youth, adults, and criminal justice-involved clients. It will also oversee contracted services like the mental health evaluation team, mobile crisis team, the hotline, the sobering center, the crisis stabilization unit, external hospitals and institutions for mental diseases, residential treatment facilities, and transportation contracts.
The next step is to transfer employees from existing departments to the new one. Of the 20 required employees, 18 are pre-existing positions like Community Action Team staff who will move over from the Justice Services division. The county is also adding a new program manager who will manage crisis continuum contracts and supervise the administrative access team—the people who answer phones on the access and information line. Δ
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 10, 2024.